General

[Sent via ATA Customer Relations website] Dear ATA, On March 24th I flew from Chicago Midway to Washington Reagan on flight #4292.  This normally 90 minute flight left Chicago at 8:10pm (Washington time) and I finally entered a taxi at Reagan when I landed at 1:30am. When our flight bound for Reagan was diverted by…

Last night at the weekly Mindshare home poker tournament I finally got a chance to put some walk behind all my talk of being a badass poker player when I took first place in our twelve person tournament. I’d like to say it was all skill, and to some extent it was, but I got…

So I took my friend’s and my poker buddy’s advice and moved from the $5 to the $10 single table tournaments on Party Poker.  My poker coach said, "This will be easy!  You won’t see a difference until you hit the $50 entry tournaments." My poker buddy (who is a million times better than me)…

I took the plunge yesterday and moved Sarah’s and my blogs over to the TypePad service.  Frankly, I was just tired of doing the maintenance on the MovableType system myself, and concluded it was sucking my "joy of life".  So while we were traveling back from the South by Southwest festival, I bought a day…

I had to attend a business meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, so I went 48 hours early so I could play some cards. I actually got to play about twenty hours worth at several different casinos on the area. Here’s my quick tutorial on low limit poker in Florida, a review of where to go and what you’ll want to do when you get there.

In case you’re wondering how I measure my poker rooms, here’s a sense of what I’d like to see in a Florida poker room:

• In-table card shufflers to maximize your hands-per-hour
• A ban on smoking at the poker table to maximize my lifespan
• Good dealers and wait staff
• Free drinks
• A steady flow of people who don’t mind losing at poker because they’re enjoying themselves

My friend and writing touchstone (and reporter extraordinaire) Aaron Pressman caught this tidbit for me on the iPod Shuffle: Analysts at IDC recently found that Apple makes a healthy 35 percent to 40 percent profit on each iPod shuffle sold, and will make even more from expected drops in flash memory pricing. “The iPod shuffle’s…

Many years ago I visited Bayona, the high end restaurant run by legendary New Orleans chef Susan Spicer. The first course was a soup I’ve never had at any other restaurant, and I suspect most chefs don’t have the balls to serve: Cream of Garlic soup.

Fans of my column on the iPod Shuffle’s marketing techniques will remember that I said the worst thing that the existing makers of flash music players could do was to abandon the market to Apple, moving upstream. Thankfully, they have not done that. Instead they have decided to cut their prices and compete with Apple.…